Oil sands and devastation

FORT MCMURRAY, Alberta — The largest dump truck in the world is parked under a massive mechanical shovel waiting to transport 400 tons of oily sand at an open pit mine in the northern reaches of Alberta.

Each Caterpillar 797B heavy hauler — three-stories high, with tires twice as tall as the average man — carries the equivalent of 200 barrels of heavy oil worth about $23,000 per haul at today's prices.

"It's like sitting on your back porch and driving your house," said Todd Dahlman, the manager of Shell Canada's Muskeg River open-pit oil sands mine in Alberta's Athabasca region.

Shell, which has 35 of the massive loaders working 24 hours a day, seven days a week, has ordered 16 more — at $5 million each — as it expands its open-pit mines. And it is not alone among major oil companies rushing to exploit Alberta's oil sands, which make Canada one of the few countries that can significantly ramp up oil production amid the decline in conventional reserves.

Shell, Exxon-Mobil, Chevron, Canada's Imperial and other companies plan to strip an area here the size of New York state that could yield as much as 175 billion barrels of oil. Daily production of 1.2 million barrels from the oil sands is expected to nearly triple to 3.5 million barrels in 2020. Overall, Alberta has more oil than Venezuela, Russia or Iran. Only Saudi Arabia has more.

Oil companies also want to tap into Utah's oil-shale and oil-sands resources. The U.S. House of Representatives, responding to growing public demand for more domestic energy, voted Wednesday to end a quarter-century ban on oil and natural-gas drilling off the Pacific and Atlantic coasts — and a more recent ban on developing oil shale in Utah, Wyoming and Colorado.

The three Western states may have up to 1.8 trillion barrels of oil trapped in oil shale, by some estimates. Environmental groups strongly opposed lifting a moratorium on issuing final rules to allow leases for development, saying it will threaten wild areas, use huge amounts of scarce water and increase global warming. Many critics of developing Utah's oil shale and sands have pointed to the devastation in Canada.

High prices are fueling Alberta's oil boom. Since it's costly to extract oil from the sands, using the process on a widespread basis began to make sense only when crude prices started skyrocketing earlier this century.